Studio Articles

I'm partnering with Tara Horn of The Praxis Department​ to offer 4 days of office hours. We're calling it Startup Therapy. You don't have to be a startup to sign up, but since we're basing out of PIE, we figured it'd be a good title. We'll be available from 9am to 2pm each day.

I know what UX is and I also do not recognize what it is. Ultimately, it’s a question best put to rest. A better question will always be: how can we help? And, related, how do we become better helpers?

Someone who looks at their budget and says, for example, “I only have $50,000 for Research and Design.” $72K is going to blow that budget. The same person hires a company that will do the work for $35K, then ends up spending $100K because they are locked in and are on the hook to launch something great.

Field studies sound expensive, time consuming and repetitive. Learn why they can actually save resources in the long run, provide new business opportunities, and give you insights into your customer's lives.

Service Design looks broadly and deeply at the interactions between people on the outside of a business and people on the inside of it; from what motivates people to engage with the business, to how the business should best entice and serve them, to how customers and companies deal with each other once they have an established relationship.

We all have to play our roles, but ultimately we’ve come together, hopefully, to make something that has meaning and we don’t necessarily have to fall into Industrial Age hierarchies in order to accomplish our shared goals.

We’d been on the conference call for a little over fifteen minutes talking with the client about the early results of usability testing on an application for reviewing the results of a DNA test.
We were seeing reactions of “too many screens,” and too much medical jargon that wasn’t explained. Test participants were getting lost and felt underwhelmed. Eventually, they would all find the right information, but the usability test results didn’t feel like a success in terms of the design proving helpful.

It isn’t fun to be constrained when trying to solve a problem or explore an opportunity. Having too little time and too little budget is something everyone runs into. But working within a constraint can lead to some surprising and creative outcomes.

A company’s reputation feeds as much its ability to turn a profit as does the things it creates in its operations. Your design should take that into account. The people who approve your deliverables should understand that. The people that sign the cheques should demand it.
It’s on all of us to stand up, be good hosts, and say “We can do better.”